The Differences and Commonalities between Green and Conventional Business Process Management

Environmentally-aware resource usage has become an important aspect for today's industries, governments, and organizations. Customer demands, legal requirements, and financial aspects force organizations to rethink and reorganize their existing structures and business processes. Along with an increasing adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) in organizations, efforts are being made to also enable a green rethinking and change of BPM. However, in order to be capable of performing business in a green manner, the "delta" has to be known that distinguishes green business process management from the conventional one. In this paper, we investigate key perspectives of conventional BPM and compare them to requirements originating from an environmental perspective. The key perspectives we refer to are the business process lifecycle, key performance indicators, BPM architectures, and business and strategy. We highlight aspects that need to be extended, newly developed, or refined in order to achieve a holistic green BPM approach.